


Quantifiable Connection

by downlookingup



Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Family, Gen, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-19
Updated: 2015-06-19
Packaged: 2018-04-05 02:46:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4162731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downlookingup/pseuds/downlookingup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We love people who have died. Where's the social utility in that? [...] Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t yet understand it."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quantifiable Connection

**Author's Note:**

> This movie completely destroyed me, so here, have a thing.
> 
> Recommended listening: ["Quantifiable Connection", an unreleased track from the score](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbh0kpATAw4).

The first time he sees Erin, she is crossing the NASA lobby looking for the conference center. NASA is doing a series of talks on cutting-edge farming techniques designed to eradicate the wheat blight, and she's representing a cooperative of Texan farmers. Cooper notices her flaming red hair first, her freckles second, the way she rolls her eyes at him third, when he tells her she’s getting a tour of the facilities from a real live astronaut; he omits the _in-training_ part. He escorts her to the conference center, and the fourth thing he notices is how she stops by the door to watch him walk away. The last thing he notices is her smile.

The last time he sees Erin, she hardly knows he’s there, the pain is so bad. She has been home for a week now, the doctors having since given up on her, and she’s spent all that time drifting in and out of consciousness, the pain intensifying. She can only hold on to his hand as he whispers in her ear that _it’ll pass_ and _everything will be fine_ and _I love you_ , and then she’s not holding his hand anymore.

*  *  *

The first time he sees Donald, he’s standing on the steps of the farmhouse, watching Erin and Coop come up the drive. He shakes Coop’s hand stiffly, examines him from the tip of his dusty boots to his worn jeans to the top of his messy hair, and Cooper thinks Donald hates him.

The last time he sees Donald, he’s sure Donald hates him.

*  *  *

The first time he sees Tom, he’s a pink little thing with the biggest set of lungs he’s ever heard. Erin, sweating, pale, exhausted, cradles him against her chest and squeezes Cooper’s hand, and he thinks he’s never been as happy—not even when he had a Ranger under his ass and a controller in his hand, soaring towards infinity—as he is right that second.

The last time he sees Tom, Tom can’t see him. He looks old; older than seventeen, yes, but also old, tired, beaten. He’s gotten married and had children and buried a son, and Cooper realizes with a pang that his son is already older than him in so many ways. He also realizes that his son will never forgive him.

*  *  *

The first time he sees Murph, he worries there’s something wrong with her. She’s too quiet, her tiny thumb in her mouth as she stares at him with an unsettling intensity. The midwife assures him the baby’s right as rain—it offers him little comfort, seeing as the rains rarely come these days and, when they do, it’s grayish sludge that falls out of the sky instead of the stuff of life—but once his daughter touches his nose and giggles, he knows she’s better than rain.

The last time he sees Murph, she looks like the oldest woman in the universe—for all he knows, she might be—but she’s still his Murphy, smiling at him with her mother’s green eyes and wearing the watch he gave her. He wishes she was ten again and then he regrets it—she’s lived a longer life than he has, a _better_ life, and he would never take that from her. The last time he sees Murph, he gets to say _goodbye._

*  *  *

The first time he sees Brand, she’s all in black, and thin and pale, like she hasn’t seen the sun in years—and most likely, she hasn’t, stuck under the earth with her test tube babies and greenhouses of blighted corn and her father’s formulas in dusty chalkboards. She doesn’t fall for his half-hearted charm, but she lets him see Murphy when he asks, and he’s grateful.

The last time he sees Brand, she’s in the white and blue pressure suit, and the glowing orange halo of debris surrounding Gargantua is reflected in the visor of her helmet and in her big brown eyes. She begs him not to detach, but he pushes the button anyway, because the mission is bigger than either of them, bigger than gravity and time, because they owe it to the dead and to the lost.

The _very_ last time he sees Brand, she’s in the white and blue pressure suit and the galaxies reflected on her helmet whiz past at the speed of light. When her gloved hand reaches out to him, he takes it and wishes that somehow, someday, she will know it was him.

He wonders what Brand will look like the next time he sees her. He imagines her in the blue, standard issue coveralls they wore under their pressure suits, still thin but burnt by the sun of Edmunds’ desert planet. Her hair will be longer, tied in a small ponytail at the nape of her neck. Maybe she’ll be watering some sprouts she’s managed to grow in the time she’s been alone. When Cooper and TARS crest the hill behind her, a tumble of rocks will draw her attention, and when she sees him, she’ll drop her water bucket, splashing the legs of her coveralls. The next time he sees Brand, he’ll say _hello_.


End file.
